kndi edelman k

KNDI 2011 Edelman KritikK Lab Adam Pease

Edelman Kritik

Edelman Kritik............................................................................................................................................................11NC Shell 1/5..............................................................................................................................................................21NC Shell 2/5..............................................................................................................................................................31NC Shell 3/5..............................................................................................................................................................41NC Shell 4/5..............................................................................................................................................................51NC Shell 5/5..............................................................................................................................................................6***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***..................................................................................................................................72NC Impact Framing / Root Cause.............................................................................................................................7A/T: Permutation......................................................................................................................................................11A/T: Framework........................................................................................................................................................14A/T: Nihilism............................................................................................................................................................15A/T: Essentialism......................................................................................................................................................16***ALTERNATIVE***...........................................................................................................................................17Alternative = Sinthomosexuality..............................................................................................................................18Alternative = Unintelligibility..................................................................................................................................19Alt Solvency..............................................................................................................................................................21***LINKS***...........................................................................................................................................................24Link – Generic..........................................................................................................................................................25Link – Space Exploration..........................................................................................................................................26Link – Temporality...................................................................................................................................................27Link – Identity Categories........................................................................................................................................28Link – Queer Alliance / Incorporation......................................................................................................................29Link – Filling the lack...............................................................................................................................................30Aff: Permutation.......................................................................................................................................................31***AFF ANSWERS***...........................................................................................................................................34Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)...........................................................................................................................35Aff: Pedophilia Turn.................................................................................................................................................37Aff: Natality Turn.....................................................................................................................................................38Aff: Cede the Political..............................................................................................................................................39

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Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize reproductive, heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to nothing more than “meaningless

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acrobatics.” This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating violence against queerness.Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” 2004, pp. 11-13)

Charged, after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the –nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and senses.” For the “pathetic” quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual enjoyment – enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological – exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to those for which enjoyment without “hope of posterity” so peremptorily dismissed” legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-creative ideology: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of mankind’s children, succumbs so completely to the narcissism – all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically misrecognized – that animates pronatalism, why should we be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that “sex totally divorced from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly acrobatic”? Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth of heterosexual sex – impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity – figures our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the social order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that “meaning,” despite itself, means

Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies systemic violence against queerness and places our species on a trajectory towards omnicide. Sedwick 1990 (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, “Epistemology of the Closet,” 1990, pp. 127-130.)

From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing--the array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or

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persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the

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Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence.

If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist *imaginaire*. In our culture as in *Billy Bud*, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time *after the homosexual* is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time *after the human*; in the wake of the homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there *were* homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow.

Fragments of visions of a time *after the homosexual* are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture [book published in 1990 -Alec]. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the enormous scale of whole populations.26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked--in the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact.

It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy [sic]. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across cultures is *one thing* with *one cause*, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive genetic path--which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive--there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly *to the degree* that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct heterosexual transmission.

Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups [the disabled -Alec], then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole

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human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse in entangled with the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say, as a distinct *risk group*, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal.27 As

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gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and universalizing ones by opened and opened and opened?

The sacralization of the Child as an idol of reproductive futurism depends on the sacrifice of the queer. Privileging large scale impacts over the systemic violence outlined in our criticism is the kind of bankrupt rationale that legitimizes violence in the first place.Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” 2004, pp. 28-31)

Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. “Society,” he opined, “has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a special interest in marriage.” With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society.” Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand here anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist group so generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us – a place at the political table that won’t have to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that future as there can be no future for queer, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at all: that the future, as Annie’s hymn to the hope of “Tomorrow” understands, is “always / A day / Away.” Like the lover son Keat’s Grecian urn, forever “near the goal” of a union they’ll never in fact achieve, we’re held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social organization as such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's words, as

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"politically self-destructive."33 But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure, necessarily destroys — necessarily insofar as this " s e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism and this "politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life. If the fate of the

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queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death drive we're called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what might become a new form of 'social organisation,' " that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is mortal."34 Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that m are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.

Our alternative is queer apocal(o)ptic/ism: this is the relentless problematization of the Symbolic, and all imagery and idolatry associated with reproductive futurism. Apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self and branches out to capture the apocalyptic moments of destruction wherein the underlying structures of heteronormative hegemony are disrupted.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 57-58)

What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer's relentless questioning of all categorical imperatives, including the ontology Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and make trouble for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus might be superseded or become defunct as an interpretative tool at some future date, as well as the dedication to examining the notion of utility itself. It is queer's commitment to the here and now, the present, not putting faith in the always postponed future but in making an immediate intervention. It is the anti-assimilationist bent in queer theory, the activist strain with its refusal to be defined by or in terms set down by the dominant culture in any given situation. It points to the fact that queer is brought into being through acts of resistance, the recognition of the potential futility of resistance because of the norm's propensity for cooption and reinvention, but the drive towards resistance all the same. It is the trace of queer's investments in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the refusal to normative coherence as fantasy and the making visible of the instability that constitutes any one thing. It characterises queer's dedication to end things and traumatic events, its commitment to death — whether it is the mournful rage of activists in response to queer deaths arising from suicide, HIV/AIDS or queer bashings; the theorist's inventiveness to the point of unintelligibility in an attempt to cast off the psychical death wrought by the identitarian strai(gh)tjacket (Haver 1997), or the anarchic proclamations of death to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of 'the death-drive, always present in any vital process'

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(Freud 2003/1933, 98). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive, driven both towards its own 'death' and by the knowledge that it will — must - end; towards a time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful, needed, required, or desired (Butler 1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also encapsulates the apocalyptic moments at which the death drive becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an imposing illusion produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative hegemony. In this, queer apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the constant production of unease at the level of identification - unsettling the very desire for social

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recognition as an identifiable subject — in the realisation that 'queer must insist ... on disturbing ... and on queering ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one' (Edelman 2004,17).

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***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***

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2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause

Heteronormativity is the all-encompassing standard of normalization used to discipline and punish queer bodies, as such, it is the site of on-going systemic violence against queerness.Elias et al. 2003 (Karen E. Lovaas PhD, John P. Elia PhD & Gust A. Yep PhD, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p.18, 2003)

In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an “Other.” This process of othering creates individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an “invisible center” (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is “the site of violence” (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created, examined, and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990). Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others.

The affirmative’s futuristic focus necessarily isolates conflicts and crises as events, spatially bounded with beginnings and endings. This myopic focus marginalizes the individuals who suffer systemic violence every day. Cuomo 1996 (Chris J. Cuomo 1996, “War is not just an event: Reflections on the significance of everyday violence,” 1996, Hypatia, Volume 11, No. 4, pg 1, proquest.)

Philosophical attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications for entering into war, and over appropriate activities within war. The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful times. Not surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical dimensions of war discuss war solely as an event--an occurrence, or collection of occurrences, having clear beginnings and endings that are typically marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-makers and agents of states. But many of the questions about war that are of interest to feminists---including how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women and members of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies--cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable decisions.In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as geer is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human

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experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances.1Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems.Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war."

Violence against the queer is reproduced based on a fundamental denial of the death drive. Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents 'an always impossible future' (11), 'a fantasmatic future' (31) which translates queerness, I think, into heteronormativity's aggressor — the Queer - a repository for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the existence of the death drive within (Klein 1997/1946,4) and the subject's resultant fear of death (Klein 1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that the future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive to experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from the presence of an internal threat (that is, the death drive) is deflected outwards to become the fear of an external threat (that is, the Queer). This internal object of fear is displaced onto the Queer who then 'becomes the external representative of the death instinct' (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a denial both of the existence of the death drive and the social's narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish fulfilment of its desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto the figure of the Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is considered to be dangerous to the Child and thus the future. It is my contention that reproductive futurism operates by first denying the presence of the death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of self-fulfilment at the same time that the anxiety of heteronormativity's own internal shortcomings and disciplining mechanisms are displaced onto the

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Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69-82). The instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud, because 'the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion' (69).

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A/T: Permutation

The permutation is a coercive universalization that, through reproductive futurism, places an ideological limit on queerness. Their intent to set out a teleogical trajectory of progress will culminate not in the incorporation of our advocacy, but rather in the eradication of it. Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 64)

Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, 'an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in die process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations' (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig's concept of the straight mind in that 'when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality' (1992,28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its 'translation into a narrative', 'its teleological determination' through politics which 'conforms to the temporality of desire', 'the inevitable historicity of desire' (Edelman 2004, 9).Reproductive futurism is, what I call, 'heterocycloptic', bound up with the desiring gaze and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of 'progress' moving endlessly towards a 'better' future, in the process imposing a panopticon ¬like self-surveillance: 'It's a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised' (Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocalyptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power — a 'coercive universalization' (Edelman 2004, 11) operates at the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: 'the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust' (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics, and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance. Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps contradictorily, the proliferation of desires - a looking-out as opposed to a gazing-within - in the service of repressing any conscious self-awareness of the death drive. Reproductive futurism is therefore, what I term, 'hetero-prophetic' in that it tries to set out programmatically what will transpire in the future; a future 'endlessly postponed' (13), thus holding the present to ransom. If it is invested in eschatology, it is only as a veneer to discipline those into enslavement to its ideals.

The permutation still links to the critique, queer temporality is an ateological alternative that is by definition hostile to the chronological organization the affirmative hopes to combine it with.Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

In Edelman’s critique of culture, queerness occupies a temporality that extends no future. On the contrary, queer times are firmly stuck in the contemporary, a childless realm that harbors only “sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself” (Edelman, Future, 13). Detrimental to the futurist regime and its accompanying principle of social structuring, heteronormativity, the contemporary becomes the quintessential queer temporality, an odd time axis that opposes chronology and teleology, and that seems to have, says Edelman, no social purpose whatsoever.

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Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic, the permutation attempts to tie this difference to its antithesis – telos. In other words, the transformative potential of our kritik is lost when it simply becomes a means to an end.Runions 2008 (Erin Runions, specialist in Hebrew bible and gender studies, “Queering the Beast: The Antichrist’s Gay Wedding,” 2008, Publishe din “Queering the Non/Human, pp 103-104.)

The apocalyptic logic used to bolster arguments for family values and to write laws against same-sex marriage is very much like logic that allows for exception to the law and torture. Within the nation, laws protect the human, comprised of those who correctly desire integration into family, nation and Christian secular humanity. Raw sex — or what is perceived as raw sex - is banished by law. Exceptions to law are made for those who are outside of this eschatological trajectory, and who therefore must be associated with the hated (yet desired) raw sex.

All of this is more than a little depressing, given the deep entrenchment of these views. So, by way of conclusion, I would like to make a final turn, to try to queer the image of the political enemy as homosexualised antichrist. Like bare life, and like raw sex, the antichrist is both included and excluded in the political (and religious) symbolic order. I have shown that this liminal position can pose physical danger to those who are identified as antichrists; but I would also like to explore the resistant potential for the danger that the antichrist poses to the symbolic order.

As I have argued, what has been so potentially threatening about the antichrist for apocalyptic exegetes through the ages is that he mixes the human and the inhuman, to the degree that they cannot necessarily be told apart. The antichrist represents both a perverted sexuality and a desire for one-world order. In the antichrist's kingdom, presumably, all humans are lumped together with the inhuman (the demonic), without attention to religion, national affiliation, gender, or sexuality. Antichristic desire is not confined by borders (national or otherwise), by categories of difference (human/inhuman). A similar point about queer desire is made with some urgency by Edelman in his short essay, 'Unstating Desire', which argues against using the language of family or political state/affiliation to describe the queer intellectual enterprise. He writes, 'Queer theory might better remind us that we are inhabited always by states of desire that exceed our capacity to name them. Every name only gives those desires — confiictual, contradictory, inconsistent, undefined — a fictive border' (1994, 345). Antichristic desire confuses identity, transgresses borders and confounds telos. It is polymorphously perverse.

Moreover, the antichrist is deceptive. This danger is what makes the figure of the antichrist so powerful: he cannot simply be recuperated as another point of identity; his deceptiveness threatens every identity. There is no telling who might be the antichrist, and whether or not there might be more than one. The antichrist could be anyone (even someone married). The double and separate identification of the antichrist — as political enemy and as gay — suggests that the political enemy might not be outside the nation at all, might not even wield weapons, but might simply desire wild, non-heteronormative, non-teleological sex. Indeed the very capitalist mechanisms (for example, marketing) that the US strives to protect alongside humanity depend on raw sex. Isn't everything sold through appeal to wildly promiscuous desire, even as the selling forecloses on desire and attaches it to telos? The uncertainty as to the locus of antichristic desires (domestic or foreign) works against the claims of empire. While the racialised, Muslim (non-national), homosexualised antichrist is essential to the production of the US's mission to save marriage and humanity, the inhuman antichrist within the nation troubles the straightforward assessment of the US's relation to being, having and saving universal humanity (strangely queer already). The deceptive presence of the antichrist within - via raw sex — troubles the US's suitability to protect heteronormative sex, and with it the family, the nation, humanity and the very concept of the human. Of course, this is precisely why efforts are so strong to ban gay marriage, as an attempt to rid the nation of raw sex and antichristic desire. The right to protect the future of humanity — that is, US hegemony — is at stake. The deceptive presence of the antichrist puts the (heteronormative) messianic claims of the US into question.

Here Edelman's use of Jacques Lacan to reclaim queerness as the death drive, in No Future, is instructive. Edelman's project is to use the antisocial impulses of desire to deconstruct the oppressions made in the name of identity. In his analysis, identity is bound up with teleology, with time and with the future; it is through hopes for the future that identity is given meaning. Futurity, as he so cuttingly argues, is tied up with the Child 'as the preeminent emblem of the motivating end' (2004, 13), and therefore with

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heteronormativity. Queer desire disrupts the future-oriented trajectory of identity, and with it, the social. Queer desire is oppositional, it embodies negativity, it disrupts rather than conjoins. Edelman wishes to take queer difference seriously, to reclaim the proliferation of queer desires, as a negativity that can disrupt identity and the social. The point is to disrupt 'normativity's singular truth' (2004, 26). In his words, 'queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it ... accept [s] its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure' (2004, 3). For Edelman, queerness is that difference that has been repressed in subjects' entry into the heteronormative symbolic order for the sake of unity and coherence, yet without which difference the subject could not function. Queerness, like raw sex, and bare life, is both included and excluded from the social order and its exclusion must be mined for its potential to disrupt the borders of inclusion. Queerness is like the death drive; it is that force emerging from 'the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic's very core' (2004, 22). It moves backward away from the future. Queerness, like the death drive, 'refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal'. It denies teleology and rejects spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism' (2004, 27). It disrupts the eschatological future that is established by the Child. It is, therefore, what Lee Quinby might call anti-apocalyptic.

The figure of political enemy as queer antichrist embodies the queer function of the death drive. Like queerness, the antichrist is inimical to the future and its logic of heteronormativity. Like queerness, the figure of the political enemy as queer antichrist is necessary to the functioning of the system; it is that which allows the machine to move into imperialising place. The queer enemy as antichrist must be recognised in its role in motivating and enabling the production of US politico-reproductive eschatology as truth. Yet it stands as a wrench in the system. It threatens to disrupt the future of the family and with it the future of the nation. Its desire erupts everywhere, anywhere. It threatens to unsettle certainty about the human, and therefore also certainty of the US mission in the world. The importance of this role needs to be acknowledged and affirmed, if the 'truth' of US sovereignty is to be contested.

The role of the political enemy as queer antichrist ought not to be repudiated. Acceptance and valorisation of this figure's disruption of national eschatology might assist in what Edelman calls, 'the impossible project of imagining an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce the politics of signification (the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier itself), which can only return to us, by way of the Child, to the politics of reproduction' (2004, 27). The antichrist disrupts meaning through the proliferation of uncontainable desires (called perverse), and through deception. The antichrist demonstrates what post-structuralism has been insisting: meaning may not be what it seems. The queer antichrist defies certainty.

Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of signification is an act of domestication that denies queerness its transformative potential.Huffer, 2010. (Lynne, Prof of Women’s Studies at Emory. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. Pg.1)

But somehow, over the years, the queer has become a figure who has lost her generative promise. She turned in on herself and became fro zen into a new, very American identity. And if the transformation itself is to be celebrated, the final freezing is not. Getting stuck in identities that are often politically or medically engineered, the queer is drained of her transformative, contestatory power. This is where History of Madness can help us, as the story of a split that produced the queer. Not only a diagnosis of the great division between reason and unreason, Madness is also a contestation of that division's despotic "structure of refusal... on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being a language [and] as having no rightful place in history. This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense" (M xxxii).

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A/T: Framework

We should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than roleplaying as policymakers we should take this chance to challenge the heteronormative structures that pervade the Academy.Elias 2003 (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, 2003)

Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality, “Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be ‘normal,’ heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle” (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as “. . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these heterosexual values” (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Letts & Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, & Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining “. . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic” (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero[sexism]). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay.

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A/T: Nihilism

Our argument is not nihilistic, it is apocalyptic. Our embrace of the death drive is a subversive blow against the system that ruptures the assumed coherence of reproductive futurism.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

Many readers have found Edelman's argument to be oppressively nihilistic; however, he does not speak of self-destruction in the sense of suicide or organic nothingness, but rather as a refusal to submit to the disciplining of fantasy in the service of reproductive futurism: 'political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life' (30).10 In response to those who insist that No Future is a stagnant and stagnating force, I offer Jonathan Dollimore's remark that 'death is not simply the termination of life ... but life's driving force, its animating, dynamic principle' (1998, 192). Edelman's rejection of 'the future [as] mere repetition and just as lethal as the past', coupled with his insistence that 'the future stop here' (2004, 31), demonstrates for me his commitment to the 'queer and now' in his formulation of queerness. This attendance to the fleetingness of the queer moment without an investment in the future, this acceptance of the death drive is not a death wish, a desire for annihilation but rather a loosening of futurity's strangulating grip, an attempt to exercise agency in a world that offers but its spectre. In the words of Jacques Derrida: 'To learn to live means to learn to die, to take into account, to accept complete mortality (without salvation, resurrection, or redemption - neither for oneself nor for any other person)' (2004).

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A/T: Essentialism

Our analysis is not a universalization but rather a genealogy of how power has used the Child to valorize reproductive futurity. This kind of Foucauldian analysis is the only way idols of normalization can be challenged.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 66)

In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley respond to what they see as Edelman's setting-up of the Child as 'the anti-queer' with the view that 'queerness inheres instead in innocence run amok' (2004, xiv). Edelman's treatment of the Child has been denounced by those who see him as flattening out the category and universalising one such usage of its figural status, without taking account of the fluctuating contours of that category over time. Edelman's analysis is not a historical one, but a genealogical meditation on how the Child has come to be signified as natural and the marker of the future to which everyone must bow, 'the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests' (2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976) and Judith Butler (1990) in interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become entangled to such an extent that 'we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child' (Edelman 2004,11). No Future works to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in which power works through technique and normalisation rather than repression or interdiction (1978/76, 89). Edelman shows that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which 'a notional freedom' stands in for 'the actuality of freedom' (2004, 11) in the heterocycloptic gaze unblinkingly directed towards the chimera of the future. Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through which access to the future can be achieved.

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***ALTERNATIVE***

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Alternative = Sinthomosexuality

Our alternative is sinthomosexuality: This is a coupling of Lacan’s notion of the symptom, the small slice of abject failure in the knot holding the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together, along with the body of the queer, figured under heteronormativity. Sinthomosexuality lays bare reproductive futurism through the continual projection and ascription of the negativity associated with the queer as the death knell of the future.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

The sinthomosexual represents, according to Edelman, 'the wholly impossible ethical act' (2004,101) to which queerness is called forth to occupy, 'the place of meaninglessness ... unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality' (47). A fusion of Jacques Lacan's idea of the sinthome, 'which ... is meant to take place at the very spot where, say, the trace of the knot goes wrong' (Lacan; quoted in Ettinger 2006, 60) and the figuration of the Homosexual within heteronormativity, sinthomosexuality represents both the failure of heteronormativity while also facilitating its continuation - however imperfectly and incomplete. As Bracha L. Ettinger writes in relation to the sinthdme-. it is 'a kind of trace of a failure in the knot that holds the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together' (59). While heteronormativity claims that queerness is stagnant and useless, I contend it is anything but: queerness is profoundly useful to heteronormativity because in order to function, heteronormativity needs its Queers to project negativity onto while relying on its reformed sinthomosexual Other, homonormativity to facilitate its smooth operation.Edelman's appeal to forgo meaning, to scorn utility and occupy a space of unassimilable jouissancen is, I maintain, in line with the thinking of Georges Bataille who rejects the notion of transgression because it often simply reifies the norm against which it acts: 'There exists no prohibition that cannot be transgressed. Often the transgression is permitted, often it is even prescribed' (1986/1957, 63). Instead, Bataille locates his analysis at the level of utility and thus productivity, what Shannon Winnubst calls 'this fundamental logic of utility at the heart of sexuality' (2007, 85). Bataille's work concentrates on the way in which eroticism has been reduced through normalisation to sexualitv in a similar way that Edelman, I propose, comments on the disciplining of sexuality by turning it into reproductive futurism. By figuring the death drive, queerness makes visible the uselessness of all sexualities, lays bare reproductive futurism as fantasy and while embodying the negativity that the social has conferred on it, refuses to facilitate its continuation. Winnubst writes of 'the horror of uselessness' which comes to signify what it means to be 'properlv human' (85), setting out how queering should engage in 'activities that ate. going nowhere', 'acts or pleasures that offer no clear or useful meaning' (90, 91), in an effort to reconfigure the societal obsession with teleology. Edelman writes of the 'inhumanity' of the sinthomosexual (2004, 109) as a way of challenging the normalising strictures of the Human. Describing the sinthomosexual as 'anti- Promethean' (108) devoid of the desire for self-actualisation through object choice, Edelman offers, I believe, one way in which this 'word without a future (33) queers the Human. This apocalyptic gesture - read here as a cathartic letting-go of the rules governing self-actualisation - puts pressure on the desire for recognition,12 on the very teleology of desire itself in the acceptance of the fact that recognition depends on the desire of another, one who in the case of reproductive futurism, may withhold at any time the 'Humanising' gaze from those marked out as Queer.

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Alternative = Unintelligibility

Our alternative is queer unintelligibility: This is an enforced invisibility that resists the catachresis of the Symbolic that imposes identity on lack in a neurotic attempt to map out the blind spots in the social order. Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” 2004, pp. 106-109)

And since nothing is ever less "aberrant, [or] unprecedented" than the "future," which functions as the literal end toward which Antigone's Claim proceeds, we should not be surprised that the phrase itself reiterates, rather than rearticulates, an earlier use of the term. In the course of responding to Lacan's account of Antigone's "death-driven movement" across the barrier of the Symbolic, Butler identifies exactly what the "duty imposed by the symbolic is," and she does so by quoting Lacan: " 'to transmit the chain of discourse in aberrant form to someone else'" (52). With this Antigone's "aberrant... future" proves orthodox after all. Undermining its claim to be aberrant and unprecedented at once, it transmits, in the requisite aberrant form, as futurity always demands—in the form, that is, whose aberrant quality is therefore anything but and whose future repeats its precedents precisely by virtue of being "unprecedented" —the Symbolic chain of discourse, in which, as everyone knows (and this, of course, is precisely what everyone knows), intelligibility must always take place.

But what if it didn't? What if Antigone, along with all those doomed to ontological suspension on account of their unrecognizable and, in consequence, "unlivable" loves, declined intelligibility, declined to bring herself, catachrestically, into the ambit of future meaning—or declined, more exactly, to cast off the meaning that clings to those social identities that intelligibility abjects: their meaning as names for the meaning-lessness the Symbolic order requires as a result of the catachresis that posits meaning to begin with. Those figures, sinthomosexuals, could not bring the Symbolic order to crisis since they only emerge, in abjection, to support the emergence of Symbolic form, to metaphorize and enact the traumatic violence of signification whose meaning-effacing energies , released by the cut that articulates meaning, the Symbolic order constantly must exert itself to bind. Unlike Butler's Anti gone, though, suck sinthomosexuals would insist on the unintelligible's unintelligibility, on the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder the inescapable Real of the drive. As embodiments of unintelligibility, of course, they must veil what they expose, becoming, as figures for it, the means of its apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler's Antigone conduces to futurism's logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen the reach of what it allows us to grasp, where she moves, by way of the future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social form through the recognition that is said to afford "ontological certainty and durability," sinthomosexuality, though destined, of course, to be claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it a figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it embraces de-meaning as the endless insistence of the Real that the Symbolic can never master for meaning now or in the "future."

That "never," Butler would argue, performs the law's instantiation, which always attempts to impose, as she puts it, "a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power" (21). Committed as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of social justice, Butler would affirm "our own power" to rearticulate, by means of catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly calls our "moralized sexual horror" (71). Such a rearticulation, she claims, would proceed through "the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence" (78). This, of course, assumes that "the unspeakable" intends, above all else, to speak, whereas Lacan maintains, as Copjec reminds us, something radically different: that sex, as "the structural incompleteness of language" is "that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable."53 No doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the social order do, in fact, change through catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as figures of "moralized sexual horror" may trade their chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social roles doesn't stop the cultural production of figures, sinthomosexuals all, to bear the burden of embodying such a "moralized sexual horror." For that horror itself survives the fungible figures that flesh it out insofar as it responds to something in sex that's inherently unspeakable: the Real of sexual difference,

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the lack that launches the living being into the empty arms of futurity. This, to quote from Copjec again, "is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan's notorious assertion that 'there is no sexual relation': sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication."54 From that limit of intelligibility, from that lack in communication, there flows, like blood from an open wound, a steady stream of figures that mean to embody—and thus to fill—that lack, that would stanch intelligibility's wound, like the clotting factor in blood, by binding it to, encrusting it in, Imaginary form. Though bound therefore to be, on the model of Whitman, the binder of wounds, the sinthomosexual, anti-Promethean, unbound, unbinds us all. Or rather, persists as the figure for such a generalized unbinding by which the death drive expresses at once the impossible excess and the absolute limit both of and within the Symbolic.

On the face of Mount Rushmore, as he faces the void to which he himself offers a face, Leonard gestures toward such an unbinding by committing himself to the sinthomosexuaPs impossible ethical act: by standing resolutely at, and on, and/or that absolute limit. Alenka Zupancic, in Ethics of the Real, notes that what Kant called the ethical act "is denounced as 'radically evil' in every ideology," and then describes how ideology typically manages to defend against it: "The gap opened by an act (i.e., the unfamiliar, 'out-of-place' effect of an act) is immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image. As a rule this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this!"55 The image of suffering adduced here is always the threatened suffering of an image: an image onto which the face of the human has coercively been projected such that we, by virtue of losing it, must also lose the face by which we (think we) know ourselves. For "we are, in effect," as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding of the self, "at one with everything that depends on the image of the other as our fellow man, on the similarity we have to our ego and to everything that situates us in the imaginary register."56 To be anything else—to refuse the constraint, the inertia, of the ego as form— would be, as Zupancic rightly says, "impossible, inhuman." As impossible and inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him or fuck him; as impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to Thornhill by crushing his hand; as impossible and inhuman as the sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure of the future and, for refusing the call to compassion, finally merits none himself. To embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out. Leonard affords us no lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond desire, to a sinthomosexuality of our own—one we assume at the price of the very identity named by "our own." To those on whom his ethical stance, his act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the irony of trying to read him as an allegory, as one from whom we could learn how to act and in whom we could find the sinthomosexual's essential concretization: the formalization of a resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the substantialization of a negativity that dismantles every substance. He leaves us, in short, the impossible task of trying to fill his shoes — shoes that were empty of anything human even while he was wearing them, but that lead us, against our own self-interest and in spite of our own desire, toward a jouissance from which everything "human," to have one, must turn its face.

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Alt Solvency

Apocal(o)ptic/ism posthuman-ously dissolves the violence of the past and present so as to obliterate the social order’s vision of the future.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 73)

Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington's description of it as 'a critical practice that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist discourse' (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves as an uncanny reminder of the death drive nestling within heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of hermetically sealing ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q activism has always been posthumanist in continuously challenging and redefining what the terms 'Human', 'Humanism' and 'Humaneness' mean, by rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those categories and their discursive effects. Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis as a strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly anti-humanist, one might say posthuman-ous': 'Occurring or continuing after the death of the human' (Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The desire for the Human therefore signifies an 'archive desire' (Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire not for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future. Heteronormativity thus works in the shadow of its own finitude, striving retroactively to reproduce the present in the future, which is always the past futurally imagined.'Human beings', The Posthuman Manifesto reminds us, 'only exist as we believe them to exist' (2003, 177). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies through which this category operates within different historical and cultural contexts. It is not about the desire for 'Human Rights'—which would be a humanising of the Queer — but rather examines our desire for the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of such a term conveys. Judith Butler links 'a liveable life' and 'a grievable death' to the instantiation of what is understood by the 'normatively human' (2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No Future, Lee Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the Child, that image which is the personification of compassion's evocation. Queering the Human demands a withholding of such mechanistic displays of compassion, the empty compulsions of heteronormativity. Such an act rejects, not the child, but those who make use of the child for their own ends.

Accession to the negativity projected on the queer has the jarring effect of depriving heteronormativity of its symbolic opposition, this reveals the incoherence of the system and problematizes it as a whole.Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 66)

While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that prompted Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation by targeting the Child where they attack Men and Straights, No Future advocates neither collectivism nor acting out. Although Edelman's text also constitutes a polemic, which includes a variety of statements that have been met both by offence and defensive hostility from readers,13 he professes the belief that speaking about queerness will not change how the dominant culture views it. In other words, proliferating discourses of queerness makes no difference as they will be condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity. An oft-quoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered such acerbic commentary in some quarters: 'Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis-, fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop' (2004, 29). These remarks have inflamed respondents to ask where the figure of the Child ends and the real child begins. A significant prefatory comment is often absented from reproductions of the above quotation, that is, Edelman's observation that no matter what individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by reproductive futurism will always hear the above proclamations as having been said anyway.

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By way of further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that 'It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die' (31). This of course points to the way in which pro-life movements often link an anti-abortion stance with an anti-homosexual position. While identity categories - however fluid and contingent - are important strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation, Edelman argues that those figured as Queer, harbingers of the death drive, should, instead of wasting their breath in espousing indignant rebuttals, accede to that position because they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing pundits, not to mention the fact that the position exercises an enormous power to jam the cogs in the machinery of heteronormativity should the occupants refuse to play the 'game' of the dominant culture. Edelman's work is a continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo Bersani (1995), Michael Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra Chasin (2000), all of whom have anatomised a growing homonormativity invested in neoliberalism, consumerism and assimilation through being seen as 'normal' by heteronormativity. In this, while Queer Nation berates lesbians and gays for not fighting back while queer bashings go on around them (1997/1990, 778), Edelman criticises lesbians and gays, 'these comrades in reproductive futurism' who seek to make reforms to the system while in the process becoming assimilated and put to work in it by being turned into sinthomsexuals (2004,19).

Our alternative escapes the oedipal restraints of the 1ac by deregulating desire, queerness becomes a continual process of opening up a space where sexuality becomes the primary concern. Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, “Birth of the Cyberqueer,” May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

Gay liberation, envisioning a "gender-free communitarian world," did not promote the separation of which Browning speaks. The explanation for the shift from gay and lesbian studies, based on the category gender, to queer theory, which fetishizes desire by rendering it autonomous, is not self-evident. It is commonly assumed that (post)modern queer studies has made a decisive and radical advance over modernism (and its precursors), which assigned questions of sexuality and desire to secondary social and intellectual status. Even while giving sexuality and desire central importance in his theory, Freud, as a modernist thinker still committed to Enlightenment assumptions, stressed that the rational regulation of sexuality and desire was necessary to civilized life, despite the inevitable "discontents" that accompany civilization as a result. Against such supposedly outmoded modernist assumptions, ludic (post)modern theory produces an atmosphere of sexual deregulation. As a-if not the-leading element in this development, queer theory is seen as opening up a new space for the subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (Epistemology 1). In this new space, desire is regarded as autonomous- unregulated and unencumbered. The shift is evident in the contrast between the model of necessary sexual regulation promoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents and the notion of sexual deregulation proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari represent the deregulating process-in which desire becomes a space of "pure intensities" (A Thousand Plateaus 4)-as a breakthrough beyond the Oedipus complex (that "grotesque triangle" [Anti- Oedipus 171]), which colonizes the subject and restricts desire.

Reading this argument in a debate introduces queered perceptions of reality to local, material institutions where change can be reliably facilitated on a micropolitical level.Morton 1995 (Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, “Birth of the Cyberqueer,” May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

Queer theory departs from traditional humanist literary and aesthetic studies (and from gay and lesbian studies) by virtue of its absorption of ludic (post)modern theoretical developments along their two main axes. Aside from the overtly ludic Derridean-Deleuzean axis, in which "liberated" desire subverts the official relations of signifieds (conceptuality) and signifiers (textuality), there is the historicist Foucauldian strand, which insists that outside the text are material institutions, enabled by discourses but not textualist in the Derridean sense.5 These institutions (as against historical materialism's global account of them) are

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disconnected and autonomous, and they can be sites of liberation where marginal groups seize power (which is voluntarily reversible). For these historicists, social inequality is a measure of the inequality of power among groups and is not, as conceived by Marx, produced by exploitation during capitalism's extraction of surplus value. On the political plane, Foucault's work converges finally with Derrida's and diverges from Marx's. It is undoubtedly some seeming agreements between Marx and Foucault (for instance, in the view that desire is not so much repressed as produced) that results in the use of such misledingp hrasesa s "Foucauldian Marxism" (Kernan 207), an expression that blurs the differences between the forms of materialism in Marx and Foucault and creates the impression that Foucauldian materialism is a better (because more upto- date) Marxism. While indeed rejecting Derrida's pantextualism, Foucault's work nevertheless coincides in crucial ways with ludic theory. The desire or sexuality Foucault writes about in The History of Sexuality is discursive: sex is "produced" in those interminable discourses early in church confessionals and later on the psychiatrist's couch. Of course, Foucault extends the notion of materiality (beyond textualism) by tying the generation of discourses to specific historically developed institutions such as the church, the prison, and the asylum. But at the same time, he theorizes these institutions as purely local sites that emerge islandlike on the surface of a culture and, like Lyotard's language games, have no common measure ("Nietzsche" 148-52). While Foucault's localization of the material has provided theoretical support for localist political actions, by groups like Act Up and Queer Nation, it has also blocked the possibility of theorizing, as Marx does, systematic global exploitation in relation to the mode of production.

Queerness is representative of the “death drive,” the pulsive force blindly hurtling the Symbolic through an unthinkable jouissance that would guarantee its collapse. Our methodology is one that forgoes traditional notions of futurity and instead embraces the negativity ascribed to queerness as a means of interrogating the very structures that enforce this negativity.Freccero 2006(Carla Freccero, Proffessor of Feminist Studies UCSC, “Fuck the Future,” 2006, A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, pp 332-334, jstor.)

Edelman wants to argue that in “our” social order — and the question of whose social order and which figural child inevitably poses itself — homosexuality comes to stand in for the antisocial force of the (death) drive that threatens the fantasy of futurity and meaningfulness, figuring, as he puts it, “the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy — and, with it, to futurity — by reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulations and repetitions of the drive” (39). Thus sinthomosexuality is the cultural fantasy that puts the homosexual in the place of the sinthome. I did wonder, reading this, how something as singular and specific to a given subject as the sinthome could take the form of a collective cultural fantasy. It would thus be interesting to put Edelman’s argument in dialogue with Teresa de Lauretis’s work on cultural representations of the death drive or, in another vein, with David Marriott’s work allocating sinthomatic status to blackness (not his terms) in the cultural fantasies of racialist social orders. But Edelman’s readings, which include film (Hitchcock), political speeches, advertisements, news stories, literary texts (Dickens and Eliot), and even musicals (Annie, Les Miz), produce concrete and imaginative examples of the cultural fantasy of futurity located in the figure of the child and the threat to that fantasy figured by a homosexuality that is imagined to represent death. The observation that in a homophobic culture, homosexuality — or queerness, as Edelman says it should more appropriately be named (39) — is made to stand in for the antisocial, for death, for a refusal of productive futurism, is not new. But what distinguishes Edelman’s analysis from other similar diagnostics is his recommendations for the ways queers and queer politics ought to respond, that is, not only by claiming for ourselves competing reproductive futurisms, holding the very same child up in our two-mommy, two-daddy arms as we proudly declaim its rightful inheritance of future benefits, but also by taking on and taking up the accusation that we represent the end of the future as we (they?) know it, by refusing liberal politics and saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (29)

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***LINKS***

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Link – Generic

Their idolization of a future necessarily dependent on heterogenital reproduction reproduces fascism through the sacralization of the Child. Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Published in “Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 60)

The Child is, in Edelman's view, the ultimate symbol of what it means to be Human so his extricating of himself from 'our current captivity to futurism's logic' (153) through his insistence that 'the future stop here' (31) also entails a rejection of the Child. The face, the identifier of the physicality of the Human (MacNeill 1998), comes in for criticism from Edelman who argues that it is through 'the fascism of the baby's face' that politics — always the manifestation of reproductive futurism in his estimation - submits us to heteronormativity's 'sovereign authority' (2004, 151). The maltreatment of children, especially by clerical members of homophobic organisations such as the Catholic Church, illustrates the fact that the figure of the Child is more often than not employed as a cynical strategy — a shifting homophobic signifier — to give the orator a 'moral' advantage in condemnations of homosexuality. Like Wittig's formulation of the straight mind, reproductive futurism cannot 'conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order not only all human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape consciousness ... "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be"' (Wittig 1992, 28). Edelman's response is to refuse to play the game of the dominant culture by championing 'the impossible project of a queer oppositionality' that 'would oppose itself to the logic of opposition' itself (2004, 4).

The rhetoric of “survival” or “fighting against the future” implicitly valorizes the Child and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of heteronormative discourse constructs a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic.Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 (Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Edelman opens his book with what he modestly terms “a simple provocation” (Future, 3), and what encapsulates the futility of an affirmative and assimilationist queer politics. He argues “that queerness names [...] the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (Future, 3), and reveals the implicitly homophobic discourse of all the Obamas and O’Sullivans who are fighting for the future of our children and our grandchildren. The futurist bias towards heteronormativity has been fueled, as Judith Butler points out, by “fears about reproductive relations” (“Kinship”, 21), by uncanny anxieties over the prospect that queer citizenship may interfere with a nation “imagined for fetuses and children” (Berlant, Queen, 1), and by the fundamental antithesis that the queer and the child embody. The principal concern of futurist America, then, is the fate of its offspring, expressed in a fearful inquiry: “What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism?” (Butler, “Kinship”, 21). Edelman recognizes that the mythical child – as the epitome of a heteronormative future-oriented social – can only be saved by a “marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject” (Future, 14), which leads him to the ensuing claim that only the linear temporal process of “ever aftering” (“After”, 476, emphasis in the original) can keep “society alive” (“After”, 476). Heteronormative America, accordingly, is constituted through its own posterity, through a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic. In an imagined community that relies on futurism as its life-giving engine, then, “the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (Edelman, Future, 4).

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Link – Space Exploration

The Affirmative represents an obsession with space exploration which employs myths of Manifest Destiny and the Final Frontier to fashion America in the mold of reproductive futurism.Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 (Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Perpetuating the futurist regime, Star Trek explicitly draws on the vocabulary of American myths. “Myth”, Lincoln Geraghty claims in a reading of the legendary qualities of American science fiction, “serves as a mode of national identity-making” (192). In his argument, he acknowledges the hegemonic capital of myth and concludes that “[c]ountries thrive on myths to create, substantiate, and preserve their national identity” (192). In the case of Star Trek, most scholars agree that the American myths evoked most frequently and most notably are the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the idea of the frontier.22 Both cultural concepts, which I already discussed in greater detail in the first chapter of this thesis, fashion America as a nation of futurity, and they install an ideological framework that makes reproductive expansion its central objective. Indeed, each episode of the original series begins with the assertion that space is “the final frontier” (qtd. In Alexander, 253), and that the imperative of the starship Enterprise and its crew is “to seek out new life and new civilizations” (qtd. In Alexander, 253). The famous aspiration “to boldly go where no man has gone before” (qtd. In Alexander, 253), then, locates the series at the heart of the mythical futurist regime and “endows”, as Geraghty points out, “Star Trek with numerous inherent culturally sanctioned meanings and ideological interpretations linked to westward expansion” (192). The Enterprise itself, Daniel Bernardi maintains, “is drawn from and extends the history of the American wagon train” (77). In the futurist recapitulation of the expansionist settler spirit, the Enterprise becomes the paramount vessel of the reproductive venture into the unknown. Reifying the bold claims of Manifest Destiny, both the wagon train and the Enterprise “enable”, as Bernardi argues, “their occupants to dominate and domesticate the frontier” (77). Both serve as vehicles that expand a particularly “American” vision of communal relations, on the one hand, and of specific temporal formations, on the other, as both “secure, in the form of the future”, as Edelman would put it, “the order of the same” (Future, 151).

Star Trek’s original outlook is also heavily indebted to John F. Kennedy’s idea of the New Frontier, a rhetorical amalgamation that includes “activist foreign policy aimed at challenging Communism in the Third World, and [...] a massive effort to advance national prestige through the manned space program” (Worland, 20). A virtual reincarnation of Jack Kennedy, Jim Kirk capitalizes on the 1960s’ obsession with the technological exploration of outer space – which at the same represented a violent compulsion to contain the influence of the Soviet Union – and positions his crew at the center of the American futurist project. Just like John F. Kennedy, Star Trek displayed great expertise in, as Rick Worland argues, “re-conceptualiz[ing] traditional frontier symbolism in ways meaningful to modern people” (22). In Star Trek, the New Frontier and the Final Frontier coincide: the common project they engage in is reproductive futurism.

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Link – Temporality

Notions of temporality, and the finitude of existence, like birth, marriage, the necessity to reproduce and death all clash with queered understandings of the passage of time. Normative temporalities that privilege futurism implicitly deny the possibility for queer existence.Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

I will return to the negativist and antagonistic claims that No Future makes, but, having described the contemporary – an eponymous notion of this thesis – as queer temporality, I find it indispensable to survey recent intellectual debates on this issue. Over the last five years, queer temporality has gained enormous academic currency. Despite heated arguments over its exact typology, queer temporality seems to be set apart by its repudiation of straight – linear, sequential, and reproductive – time frames and its resistance to teleological cultural narratives. Elizabeth Freeman, for instance, suggests that the “sensation of asynchrony” (“Introduction”, 159) may be reminiscent of queer time, while Carla Freccero creates an “alternative temporal model” (489), which she outlines as “[q]ueer spectrality – ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality” (489). For Nguyen Tan Hoang, “a sense of belatedness” (Dinshaw et al., 183) is a crucial attribute of queer temporality, while Kate Thomas finds her sociotemporal solution in the “prepositional quality of queer” (619, emphasis in the original), which is, as she reminds us, “relational rather than teleological” (619). Tom Boellstorff, in his analysis of the “United States, where millenarianism has a particular historical and contemporary reference” (228), postulates that queer temporality is coincidental, a “time in which time falls rather than passes, a queer meantime that embraces contamination and imbrication (228). Judith Halberstam, in a more political argument that will be prominent later in this thesis, claims that “queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities [...] that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2) and finds queer temporality in opposition to these temporal paradigms, in what she calls a “stretched-out adolescence” (153). Elizabeth Freeman , in yet another article, strikes a similar chord. She also analyzes the normative powers of everyday temporal organization and argues that “[n]eoliberalism describes the needs of everyone else, everyone it exploits, as simply, generically, deferred” (“Binds”, 58). Queer temporality, all these theoreticians assert, resists a dramatic conception of time. Instead, it is contemporary: coincidental, asynchronous, belated, or deferred, hopelessly lagging behind an aggressive futurism that denies any possibility for queer existence.

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Link – Identity Categories

Notions of static identity do not accurately describe queerness. Labels like “gay” or “lesbian” are only useful insofar as they are determined to be ludic signs with no discernable textual coherence.Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, “Birth of the Cyberqueer,” May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

The queer subject is deprived of the possibility not only of speaking for (others or even itself) but also of speaking in the name of: it cannot speak in the name of any principle, such as social justice (an up-to-date position articulated in Stanley Fish's declaration "I don't have any principles" [298]). As a social construct that can only act self reflexively, by deconstructing itself, the (post)- modern subject can only perform, not practice. In the terms made familiar by Judith Butler, whose work deconstructs the notion of (gender) identity, the subject's actions are "not expressive but performative" (Gender Trouble 141). In other words, they do not express the subject's inner essence (soul, spirit, psyche, etc.), as the modernist tradition proposes, or even some constructed and existing identity, as the (post)modernist position might imply. Just as Baudrillard understands the simulacrum to be a copy that has no original and that renders all representations copy effects (see Simulations), Butler understands gender as a gender effect, a simulation or mimicry of nothing that is prior to it, a nonreferential repetition." There is," Butler argues, "no gender identity behind expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (Gender Trouble 25). The subject becomes what Deleuze and Guattari call an "asignifying particle" (A Thousand Plateaus 4). Such a position leads Butler to declare that although she will use "the sign of lesbian," she will do so only on condition that it is "permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies"( "Imitation"1 4). To be gay is to have a mere identity; to be queer is to enter and celebrate the ludic space of textual indeterminacy. As Gregory Bredbeck declares in the queer mode, "Homosexuality is textuality in its most potent and postmodern form" (255).

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Link – Queer Alliance / Incorporation

Notions of “queer alliance” are nothing more than attempts to incorporate the queer into an existing social order that will only domesticate difference.Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” 2004, pp. 4-5)

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social – such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer – but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some determinate stance or “position” whose determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible – to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism – I do not intend to propose some “good” that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing and certainly not what we call “good,” can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism that’s always purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic’s undoing, to the necessary contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for “none of the above,” for the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic, which would echo that law’s foundational act, its self-constituting negation. The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us, is installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue a negation of this primal, constitutive, negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic’s negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer.

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Link – Filling the lack

Queerness is Lack – the queer represents certain particularities of the Real that the limited vocabulary of the Symbolic order is capable of describing, providing necessary reassurance to the fixed normative identities existing within the Symbolic. Attempts to paper over this inherent gap of signification are generated by and generative of structural violence against queerness.Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” 2004, pp. 25-27)

Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the Child, enacting a logic of repetition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order. Bound up with the second is the figure of the queer, embodying that order’s traumatic encounter with its own inescapable failure, its encounter with the illusion of the future as suture to bind the constitutive wound of the subject’s subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically, both from and into itself. In the preface to Homgraphesis I wrote that the signifier “gay,” understood “as a figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of the sexual… designates the gap or incoherence that every discourse of ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual identity’ would master.” Extending that claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape. As a figure for what It can neither fully articulate nor acknowledge, the queer may provide the Symbolic with a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real, remains unnamable. But repudiations of that figural identity, reflecting a liberal faith in the abstract universality of the subject, though better enabling the extension of rights to those who are still denied them, must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless coherence of the Symbolic whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive force of queer irony. If the queer’s abjectified difference, that is, secures normativity’s identity, the queer’s disavowal of that difference affirms normativity’s singular truth. For every refusal of the figural status to which queers are distinctively called reproduces the triumph of narrative as the allegorization of irony as the logic of a temporality that always serves to “straighten” it out, and thus proclaims the universality of reproductive futurism. Such refusal perform, despite themselves, subservience to the law that effectively imposes politics as the only game in town, exacting as the price of admission the subject’s (hetero)normalization, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual practice or sexual “orientation,” through compulsory abjuration of the future-negating queer.

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Aff: Permutation

The permutation is a means of recognizing the transformative potential of the future as an untouched ground for social change, queerness needs to draw strength from its own aggressive confrontation with heterosexuality, rather than accept the negativity projected onto it by heterosexuality.Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online: http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)

Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's politics is insufficiently radical. After all, Butler has been criticized, like Edelman, for trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern argot and for failing to offer a viable model of political agency. To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and Foucaultian commitments constrain her ability to posit a stable political agent and to conceive a politics that would radically oppose, rather than merely reinforce or marginally reinflect, a dominant cultural order. But in her recent work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has turned to the "question of social transformation" (the title of UG's tenth chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social transformation "…is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living" (219). Lest she be accused of nominalism, Butler stresses the importance of real bodies in forging such a vocabulary: "…the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation" (217). While Edelman rejects the future as a site of social reproduction, Butler prizes it as a space of uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon which competing and perhaps unforeseeable claims will be made and new social orders elaborated.

Butler's model offers queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's, not simply because it confers agency upon social actors and highlights the social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes the liberal inclusiveness for which Edelman faults it. Butler's queer world is not one in which the dominant order remains stable as it incorporates, or ingests, peripheral sexualities into its fold. Rather, it is one in which the periphery remakes the center, rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or "American" or "queer." Thus, queers do not simply enter society on heterosexuality's terms; they recast such terms, seizing upon instabilities in signification to elaborate previously unarticulated and perhaps unanticipatable ways of life. Edelman's point that 'queer' names "the resistance of the social to itself" (2002) combats the very anti-futurism he endorses; in this formulation, queerness functions as the force that prevents a particular social order from coinciding with itself, from congealing into a futureless nightmare. Queer, then, might denote the instability of all norms and social orders, their intrinsic capacity for change

We should embrace the Child not as a symbol of our collective future but rather as a queerable symbol that can be used to further problematize the system. The permutation solves best. Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online: http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)

Queer theorists more politically programmatic than Edelman frequently neglect this point. Michael Warner, for example, accuses gays and lesbians who aspire to marriage of caving, in assimilationist fashion, to heterosexual norms perceived as demands. But queers never exist completely outside such norms—and thus cannot, logically, succumb to them—and marriage and childrearing might not look the same with gays on board. After all, gays who have been traumatized by their parents' homophobia and lessons of compulsory heterosexuality are probably less likely than their heterosexual counterparts to repeat such

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mistakes. Insofar as married gays retain connections to less traditional elements of queer culture, we cannot assume that they will abandon their fights for sexual freedom, conform entirely to all matrimonial traditions, or turn their backs upon their promiscuous peers. Some might, but many will not.

Edelman's book works well as an intensely academic polemic but as a political resource it proves insufficient. If queer theory is to have a social impact, it must interpellate the gay and lesbian audience to whom, after all, it is primarily addressed. Few of these people, we can safely assume, want to live in a void or die Antigone's death. Queer culture should keep insisting that we not sacrifice present, pressing needs to heterosexual fantasies, but to secure its future it must imagine a political order in which the needs of children are not inimical to the interests of queers, and it must celebrate—as Eve Sedgwick does so passionately in "How to Grow Your Kids Up Gay" – that which is most queer, and queer-able, in children.

What is needed is not a disavowal of the future but rather a conflation of the future and the present, the permutation solves best.Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

In an article published in the aforementioned volume, The Futures of American Studies, Jose Munoz argues for “the enactment of what I call, following C. L. R. James, a future in the present” (“Future”, 93). Acknowledging the teleological futurism of heteronormative America, Munoz asks, “[c]an the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction?” (“Future”, 93). He then purports to analyze performances that contain an “anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually existing queer reality, [and] a kernel of political possibility” (“Future”, 93). For Munoz, the contemporary of performance points towards an other future, a time that neither reproduces heterosexuality nor justifies itself solely on the grounds of a mythical child. The contemporary, as a temporality in which utopian contemporaries can thrive, rather, represents a “coterminous time where we witness new formations within the present and the future” (Munoz, “Future”, 100), and where we jubilantly welcome the discursive multiplication of the social. Through the conflation of the future and the present, then, I believe that we can approximate the utopian anticipatory illumination that, as Munoz claims, “will provide us with access to a world that should be, that could be, that will be” (“Future”, 108).

Edelman’s argument characterizes lack as the point at which signification fails to describe the particular jouissance of the queer and thus replicates the violence of the Symbolic. This interpretation fails to account for the fact that lack can be the opening of political conflict and change, not an endless replication of the Symbolic order.Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 191-192)

I stand by my claim that Edelman builds a psychoanalytic theory of the political realm, in the sense that he gives a psychoanalytic account of what the political realm is. Politics in his account fuses the Symbolic order to the social order and, in response to the Symbolic’s inherent failure to symbolize the Real of the drives that unhinge every human being’s integration into the social-symbolic order, generates a subtending futurist-nostalgic fantasy of sexuality as reproduction. Because the fantasy too is everywhere exceeded by reality, this mechanism in turn produces the homophobic figuration Edelman has described in “The Future is Kid Stuff”: “the order of social reality demands some figural repository for what the logic of its articulation is destined to foreclose, for the fracture that persistently haunts it as the death within itself” (“Future is Kid Stuff” 28). I cited Claude Lefort at some length because he visits the same precincts of the psychoanalytic theory of discourse in order to formulate the discursive dynamic of democracy. But rather than conceptualizing the entire social-political order as a psychic apparatus as Edelman does, Lefort draws on Lacan’s notion of the inherent gap between symbolization and the “real” to formulate the modern state’s representation of the “real” of the social. Since the democratic

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state limits its own powers and thus delimits civil society as the nonpolitical space it impossibly must represent, the gap between symbolic and real is the opening of political conflict and change, not an endless replication or reaffirmation of the social order. Every ideological or political articulation—whether the particular discourses of power (law, economics, aesthetics, etc.) or the institution of the state itself—holds a potentiality for change because of, not in spite of the fact that its representation of the “real” fails. Therein lies the crux of the difference between Edelman’s position and my own.

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***AFF ANSWERS***

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Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)

Embracing queerness as the death drive is not an effective means of challenging futurity; in fact the drive depends on the deferral of futurity, locking their resistance into a repetitive cycle of symbolic opposition.Snediker 2006 (Michael Snediker, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Literature at Mount Holyoke College, 2006, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3)

The thrill of the death drive, thus instantiated, is less in knowing one's relation to a funnel of semen than in not knowing. The death drive, for all its externally imposed Tarantino-esque luridness, depends on the contingencies of knowing, themselves dependent on a horizon in which contingencies might themselves come to fruition (or to recall Edelman's reading of The Birds, come to roost). The death drive, then, doesn't oppose futurity so much as depend on the deferral of futurity so as to extend as long as possible the Jamesian project of waiting. The death drive, even in its cathexis to deferring, is futurally organized. The death drive may be impulsive (the manner of drives), but maximization of its concomitant pleasures requires patience, in requiring and being ravished by the tick of minutes, hours, days, in between the fever-dream of possibility and its coming or not coming (as it were) to pass.

Edelman’s argument fails to provide a pragmatic solution for how the queer should go about embodying difference, this is a massive solvency deficit for the alternative.Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online: http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)

But his book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis (conspicuously absent from this book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs something like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at the core of language, forcing each signifier to find its meaning in the next ad infinitum, thus preventing signification from ever completing itself or establishing meaning once and for all. This internal limit subtends and makes possible all meaning-making while simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it marks the place of a recalcitrant, functionless, and socially corrosive jouissance—an excessive enjoyment over which language, society, and the future stumble. Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it. They are "…the violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance…"(132).

One might fault Edelman, as John Brenkman has, for transposing a rule of language onto the order of being. But even if one takes his equation seriously, one must ask what is gained by actively occupying a structurally necessary role. In other words, if the Real must exist for the Symbolic to function, then the abyss will remain whether homosexuals agree to inhabit it or not. Edelman acknowledges this reality but argues that if homosexuals exit the abyss a new subaltern will be compelled to enter it. Better, then, to remain inside and mirror back to heterosexuality what troubles it most—meaninglessness, death and antisocial desire. Unfortunately, Edelman provides few details as to how we might accomplish this task, and his insistence elsewhere that the powers-that-be will clamp down with unmitigated force to repress and disavow the encroaching Real renders such a strategy less than appealing. At one point he encourages queers to pursue a more traditional politics alongside his radical recommendation (29), but he fails to acknowledge that if the former succeeds—and the dominant culture brings queers and/or their practices into its fold—then the latter's intended audience will no longer be listening.

Edelman effaces the difference between democracy and totalitarianism, casting democracy as a fascist, dominant system. This misconception anchors the call to action he argues as alternative and eliminates the chance for embracing the innovation that democracy provides.

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Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 189)

In my view, Edelman effaces this difference between democracy and totalitarianism. He attributes to democracy the workings of totalitarianism: he makes no distinction between civil society and the state, equates “the social order” with politics as such, and equates both with the symbolic order. This misconception of democratic politics is what anchors his call for “a true oppositional politics” whose meaning-dissolving, identity-dissolving ironies would come from “the space outside the frame within which ‘politics’ appears” (“Post-Partum” 181). The democratic state, as opposed to the totalitarian, does not rule civil society but secures its possibility and flourishing; conversely, civil society is the nonpolitical realm from which emerge those initiatives that transform, moderately or radically, the political realm of laws and rights. For that very reason, the political frame of laws and rights, and of debate and decision, is intrinsically inadequate to the plurality of projects and the social divisions within society—there is always a gap in its political representation of the “real” of the social—and for that very reason the political realm itself is open to change and innovation. Innovation is a crucial concept for understanding the gay and lesbian movement, which emerged from within civil society as citizens who were stigmatized and often criminalized for their sexual lives created new forms of association, transformed their own lifeworld, and organized a political offensive on behalf of political and social reforms. There was an innovation of rights and freedoms, and what I have called innovations in sociality.

Queer temporalities invite violence, and negativity into society, poisoning any possibility of a future. Rather than being rigorously negative we should instead embrace the indeterminacy of queer temporalities but as a means of creating a better, more utopian future. Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Halfway through this chapter, an intellectual endeavor to theorize utopian contemporaries, I have introduced the contemporary as a critical temporality that resists reproductive time lines and that, revealing its amorphous indeterminacy, actively queers the dramatic futurism which constitutes the American imagined community. According to the antisocial thesis, however, the contemporary is not at all utopian: on the contrary, it is invested with the dystopian powers to undo identities, to destroy the social, and to tirelessly poison any future with negativity. This ingenious correlation between the contemporary and queer negativity leads me to further interrogation, invoking the following questions: May not the contemporary, despite the queer demand that the future stop here, also function as a critical temporal domain to originate new, other futures? Is not the contemporary, precisely because of its queer indeterminacy, an ideal testing ground for alternative futurities, or for a reconfiguration of temporality on the whole? And might not a queer social that prefers the contemporary to the future child be a truly utopian prospect? In the remainder of this chapter, I want to investigate these issues and try to answer the above questions in the affirmative. It is my ambitious aim to illustrate that, following David Roman, “the power of the contemporary [lies] precisely in its nowness” (America, 15), and that its indecisive temporal existence furthers the profuse origination of other, and better futures. As this study will show, the contemporary is not necessarily socially negative: it may also extend the buoyant positivity of utopia.

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Aff: Pedophilia Turn

Edelman prioritizes the aesthetic over the political, in doing so he blurs the lines between denouncement of the Child and destruction of the Child. This strengthens heteronormativity by associating queerness with pedophilia, depleting the ethical value of Edelman’s argument.Hardie 2006 (Melissa Hardie, Professor of English University of Sydney, “Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,” September 3rd 2006, http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/theorycluster/2006/09/lee_edelmans_no_future_queer_t.html)

Many queer people want to breed – and this isn't simply because of their indoctrination into an existing political order. In fact, I would say that queer men have a particular proclivity to parenthood, just because they often (though by no means always) possess certain effeminate traits which enable those maternal qualities which, in the heterosexual world are often (though by no means always) stronger, or at least more primal, than paternal ones. This explains why an inordinate number of queer men end up in positions such as teaching, nursing etc. However, leaving aside the personal/political problem, and addressing Edelman's text on a purely political level (or, alternatively, his central connection between queer people and anti-reproductivity as a purely figurative image), problems remain. There is a fine line between renouncing children and destroying children – and Edelman chooses texts which blur this line, most notably Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Read in the wrong way – or even read in a manner slightly different from that which Edelman has intended (in a word, read with the same provisional disregard for established authorial intention that he shows for the texts he critiques) – Edelman figuratively equates queerness with the destruction of children. This is extremely unfortunate, given the popular equation of queerness and paedophilia. It seems to me that Edelman's use of his queerness to articulate a space dia metrically opposed to the current political status quo is mirrored, fictionally, in the novels of Dennis Cooper – and I wouldn't want Cooper's novels invested with the same political momentum – or at least the same queer-oriented political momentum – as Edelman's theory. The comparison is doubly instructive because I feel that, in both cases, political subversiveness (ironically) doesn't spring from any convincingly articulated political statement, but from an inordinate prioritisation of the aesthetic above the political (which I take as a cipher for the ethical, the philosophical etc). I am aware that Cooper's dead teenagers are often connected, figuratively, to the marketed, mannequinised postmodern bodies we are all trying to escape. However, I feel that trying to find a "moral" per se in Cooper is just as erroneous as trying to find a "moral" in de Sade – and perhaps just as erroneous as trying to find any practical (or convincing) "moral" in Edelman.

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Aff: Natality Turn

Edelman’s failure to delineate between the democratic and totalitarian state is a fundamental misconception at the crux of his argument. In describing the democratic state as if it were totalitarian their argument limits out natality and to an extent, reproductivity as politically subversive instruments.Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 191-192)

The political realm is ungrounded. It can never find a place to stand in the “real,” and yet it has no other place to stand. Edelman interprets this ungroundedness as the death that ever haunts the body politic and that it must perpetually expel in the figure of an anathema it then threatens with violence; he arrives at this interpretation, I have suggested, because he describes the democratic state as though it were a totalitarian state. It follows from that that all political participation reiterates the reproductive anathematizing- sacrificial logic of the whole mechanism. My strong objection to this conclusion is the source of what Edelman calls my reasonableness; he is right, except 190 John Brenkman that what I find unreasonable in his formulation is its rationality, the all-embracing logic to which it subjects the uncertainties and possibilities of politics. The ungroundedness of the political realm preoccupied Hannah Arendt in her many reflections on the ancient heritage of Greek democracy. She had a strong sense that democracy is far more fragile and fleeting than modern liberal thought supposes. At the same time she linked the fragility of the body politic to its very sources of inauguration and innovation. Human mortality is a condition of action, but since action is a capacity for beginnings, inauguration, newness, it also evinces what she called human “natality.” We mortals come into the world “newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth.” This natality makes politics a realm of innovation and fragility, of the one because of the other:

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Aff: Cede the Political

Divorcing the struggle against reproductive futurism from the political sphere makes a fatal mistake and in doing so nullifies the advancements of many queer activists. Edelman’s argument assumes that the idol of the Child is the foundational discourse from which the political is founded upon. Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 190-191)

I have not tried to offer a more optimistic (or futurist) assessment of the gay struggle than Edelman, though he has construed my remarks in that way; his essay very pointedly conveyed a sense of the ongoing ordeal of gays in American society and a pessimism regarding inaction on the AIDS crisis, domestic partner rights, and anti-gay violence and the persistence of repressive restrictions on sexual freedom. I have also not challenged his criticism of the figure of the child as futurity, because I find it is very persuasive. So, too, Edelman offers a compelling interpretation of homophobia in his delineation of how this discourse figures the child as future in order to make the queer the figure of the death and jouissance, of the negativity, that haunts all (normalizing) fantasies of the sexual relation and sexual identity. What I have challenged is the claim that this discourse defines, or even dominates, the political realm as such. It is the discourse of conservative Catholicism and Christian fundamentalism, and even though it resonates in strands of liberal discourse, it represents an intense reaction, backlash, against changes that have already taken place in American the gay and lesbian movement. society, many of them as the direct result of feminism and the gay and lesbian movement. It is indeed important not to underestimate the depth and danger of this reaction, but it is a reactionary, not a foundational, discourse. The uncoupling of sexuality and reproduction is ubiquitous in American culture today as a result of multiple developments beyond the expansion of gay rights and the right to abortion, including birth control, divorce, and changing patterns of family life, as well as consumerism and mass culture; it may well be that the sheer scope, and irreversibility, all of these developments also intensifies the targeting of gays by conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalist movements. But that is all the more reason to recognize that the deconstruction of the phobic figuration of the queer is a struggle to be pursued inside as well as outside politics.

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kndi edelman k

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